Contributors' Charter

IMDb's mission is to be the world's most trusted and authoritative source of movie, TV, and celebrity content and to make that content available to the widest audience possible.

IMDb has been continuously growing, changing, and evolving since its creation in 1990, but one thing never changes: our reliance on you, and the millions of people like you, who contribute to IMDb by adding and correcting data. Hundreds of millions of IMDb users rely on the data you submit to help them make informed choices about what to see, discover titles they might not otherwise have found, and enrich their viewing experiences by providing fascinating extra information and context.

This charter recognizes the importance of our contributors and explains what we should expect from each other.

We welcome all contributors. Whether you're adding your first credit or you've been contributing for decades, you are important to us. Without you, IMDb would not exist.

We will treat every contributor with courtesy and respect.

We will process your contribution promptly. We do apply different levels of priority to different types of data, with different service level agreements (SLAs). These can be reviewed on the Processing Times page. This page is updated every business day so that we can let contributors know about any delays and backlogs.

We will listen. We will respond to issues raised by our contributors and will include your ideas and suggestions in our own policy discussions.

We will improve. We will never stop reviewing and revising our policies to reflect changes in the entertainment industry or in the ways in which people use our data or simply because we (or you) have thought of a better way of doing things.

We will try to create clear and consistent policies in the contribution guides based on the practicalities of managing a database of this size. We respectfully ask that contributors follow these policies even if they may personally disagree (in which case debate is, of course, encouraged).

In return we hope that when there is a difference of opinion, contributors also show courtesy and respect during their conversations with each other and with IMDb staff.

IMDb tracks each contributor's accuracy over time and if any contributor repeatedly submits data which is inaccurate or which violates our policies, their contributions will require increasing levels of additional proof in order to be processed.

Thank you for helping to keep IMDb up to date and comprehensive and for making it the premier online entertainment destination.